By Preston Wilder
The first half-hour of American Sniper is a stunning demonstration of movies’ power to make us identify with a total stranger, hence manipulate our feelings. We open in Iraq, where sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is perched on a rooftop, rifle at the ready (the camera actually pans from the rifle to the man). His gun is pointed at two suspected bombers: a woman and her young son. “Your call,” says a fellow soldier – and any sane audience will be hoping Kyle doesn’t pull the trigger, even as woman and boy act increasingly suspiciously. Who wants to see a child get his head blown off? But the film cuts away, leaving the situation in mid-air, flashing back to Kyle’s youth and how he ended up on that rooftop – and, by the time we return half an hour later, we understand why he has to shoot, and may even be willing him to do so. The film’s world has become his world. We no longer see the child; we see him.
I say ‘we’, and of course I mean myself – but I’m not the target audience for American Sniper, if anything I tend to resent this kind of movie. 14 years of foreign wars seem to have erased a lot of nuance from American cinema – not just in films which are explicitly about the ‘war on terror’ (Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty) but, for instance, in the recent Captain Phillips, which reflexively treated its Somali pirates as an Other to be wiped out. Chris Kyle is a lot like the snipers in that film’s queasy climax, waiting for the Somalis to lift up their heads so they can be shot. In fact, one could say that a sniper is the perfect symbol for America’s war, which tends to be fought with drones and long-range technology: sitting snugly on his rooftop with the people below at his mercy, ready to rain down hi-tech destruction at a moment’s notice.
American Sniper – a runaway hit on home soil, having made over $300 million at the US box office – doesn’t placate those doubts, if anything it aggravates them. The film’s depiction of Iraqis as devious, homicidal or both doesn’t exactly scream sensitivity, and when the Army vows to “put the fear of God into these savages” the film takes that at face value. Yet this is an immensely potent drama – and, despite appearances, not an irresponsible one.
Cooper plays Kyle as a man of few words: bulked-up, inarticulate, self-consciously a rugged individualist (an early girlfriend tries to hurt him by sneering that he thinks he’s a cowboy, but he’s really just a ranch-hand). It’s a wholly successful performance by an actor previously known for garrulous smart-alecks – and it’s clearly modelled on the film’s director, 84-year-old Clint Eastwood, who would surely have played the role himself back in the day. Part of Sniper’s success lies in putting the man in context – a church-going, gun-loving, patriotic Texas context, and a righteous dad who drums it into young Chris that there are three kinds of people in this world, sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. He, of course, is a sheepdog, fated to fight the predators with his “gift of aggression”.
Is aggression a gift? Eastwood and Cooper walk a fine line with miraculous delicacy, managing to preserve Kyle’s worldview – his steadfast air of certitude – while also suggesting all the things that may be eating away at him. He won’t talk about war with his wife Taya (Sienna Miller), but does lash out briefly at all the people leading “simple, simplistic lives” while soldiers are dying. A doctor finds he has high pressure; a shrink diagnoses “a saviour complex”. His faith in the Army may be misplaced – war is “all part of the plan,” he says airily, but what if the higher-ups don’t have a plan? – yet he knows he can’t waver; one of his buddies writes a letter to his wife, confessing doubts, and is dead just a few days later (“That letter killed him”). In the end he becomes obsessed, haunted. “I need you to be human again,” says Taya.
All this is there – yet the film isn’t deep, or especially subtle. Iraq is an action movie, with revenge missions (“We’re going back out!”) and Dirty Harry lines like “Lights out, mooj!” (from ‘mujahideen’). One battle sequence keeps cutting back to pregnant Taya in the US, listening on the phone and increasingly distraught, in a way that’s downright tasteless (I assumed it was plot-related, i.e. she was going to lose the baby, but no, it’s just Clint being Clint). In the end, it’s hard to say why American Sniper works so much better than the superficially-similar Fury, another recent tale of virtuous soldiers – but maybe it just comes down to that old chestnut, a movie’s power to make us identify with a total stranger. Chris Kyle is “dangerous”, and also very good at his job. So is this movie.
DIRECTED BY Clint Eastwood
STARRING Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes
US 2014 132 mins
